Bruce Willis latest movie Surrogates

Taken at face value, Bruce Willis’ new sci-fi thriller Surrogates sports a premise every bit as outlandish as the wig he wears during much of the movie. In the film’s near-future setting, humans have withdrawn from everyday life almost completely. Instead, they hole up in their homes and send robotic versions of themselves, called “surrogates,” into the real world.The remote-control androids, which look vaguely like the robots from 1973’s Westworld, perform the operators’ jobs and interact with other surrogates. Willis stars as both a fresh-faced surrogate and its worn-out operator, who chafes at the lack of personal interaction in his life.

“In this movie, people stay at home in their underwear wired into this fantastic massagelike chair device for 16 hours at a stretch and operate this idealized version of themselves that they can control like a puppet,” said Surrogates director Jonathan Mostow as he previewed snippets of the film in his editing bay on the Disney lot last month.During the Wired.com video interview above, Mostow expounds on surrogate technology and elaborates on the human/machine dynamic in the PG-13 film, which opens Friday. “If your brain waves say, ‘OK, raise your hand up like this,’ then that’s what the robot does,” he said.Human-machine interfaces have been explored before in movies, from Sleep Dealer’s node workers, who jack in to a network to operate machines remotely, to The Matrix’s humans-as-batteries paradigm.

Pure sci-fi, right? Not entirely. Chad Cohen, science producer for Discovery Studio’s upcoming Discovery Channel series Curiosity, says Surrogates draws from real-world technology to sell its central concept.“There is certainly a lot of research out there relating to neural interfaces that would help audiences make the leap and buy the premise,” he said. In fact, as the movie starts, it uses news clips citing real scientific experiments to set up its story line.